Category Archives: COVID-19
How South Africa is integrating COVID into routine care for mothers and babies

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. COVID-19 has had a direct impact on maternal mortality. Pregnant women are not at an increased risk of becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2. But data show they are at higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease. This is especially the…
COVID-19 official counts can miss mild cases – here’s how serosurveys that analyze blood for signs of past infection can help

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. It’s an eye-catching statistic: 58% of the whole population and 75% of kids in the U.S. had been infected by the coronavirus by the end of February 2022. That’s a pretty big jump from the official case count…
COVID vaccination recommendations evolve over time. Who is due for which dose now?

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. Over the last year, COVID vaccination recommendations have been updated regularly. So it can be difficult to keep track of how many vaccine doses you and your family members need. This may seem confusing, but it is actually…
How COVID controls hit farmers in 7 low-income countries, most in Africa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. Since its emergence more than two years ago, COVID-19 has reached nearly every corner of the globe. It has infected hundreds of millions of people, and overwhelmed health systems worldwide. But its impact goes beyond its direct health…
Wastewater monitoring took off during the COVID-19 pandemic – and here’s how it could help head off future outbreaks

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. A community’s sewage holds clues about its COVID-19 burden. Over the course of the pandemic, wastewater surveillance has become an increasingly popular way to try to understand local infection trends. Microbiologists Susan De Long and Carol Wilusz met…
A burnt-out health workforce impacts patient care

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve heard much about health-care worker burnout. But what we haven’t heard much about is its effects on patients. Even before the pandemic, health workers were grappling with long hours, high workplace demands, staff shortages,…
How prisons are using COVID-19 containment measures as a guise for torture

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. Newly reported data shows that torture continues in federal prison segregation units. It’s an ongoing feature of Ontario provincial jails too. As critical criminology and policy scholars, we publish widely on issues of confinement and are active in…
Why COVID-19 gaslighting by politicians is so dangerous for democracy
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the United States Capitol building, the Republican Party faced a crucial moral test: whether to reject the baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 general election had been “stolen”…
Why are there so many new Omicron sub-variants, like BA.4 and BA.5? Will I be reinfected? Is the virus mutating faster?

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. By now, many of us will be familiar with the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. This variant of concern has changed the course of the pandemic, leading to a dramatic rise in cases around…
Recent COVID-19 court cases show New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act is not as strong as some might wish

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. While the recent legal challenges to elements of the government’s COVID-19 response have had mixed results in the courts, they have revealed something important – how the rule of law works in New Zealand. In the past two…